Tourism HR Canada (THRC) and Canada’s LGBT+ Chamber of Commerce (CGLCC) collaborated to deliver a responsive, comprehensive and sustainable LGBTQ+ Tourism Market Ready Program aimed at helping tourism businesses and communities develop a lucrative and fast-growing LGBT+ market. A series of diversity & inclusion workshops, market ready seminars, destination audits, business accreditations and training of trainer sessions were delivered across Canada to certify tourism businesses with LGBT+ Ally status.
The program had been running for almost a year with hefty goals that had to be met to ensure future funding. As the project came closer to the end, and their targets were far from being met, Tourism HR Canada and CGLCC realized they needed to enlist the support of a third party to ensure success of the program.
Our team identified that in order to reach their goals, it was imperative that there was buy-in from tourism media, businesses and stakeholders to participate in and promote the workshops, seminars and other activities that are a part of the Allyship certification curriculum. Beattie Tartan partnered with THRC and the CGLCC on a proactive integrated communications strategy to support the LGBTQ+ Tourism Market Ready Program rollout. This included bilingual, pan-Canadian campaigns centred on earned media relations as well as recruitment and stakeholder marketing and communications.
Our efforts aimed at creating awareness of the program, sustaining active participation in all activities with the goal of accreditation and positioning Tourism HR Canada as an industry leader while supporting its mandate of building Canada’s world-leading tourism workforce.
Through our work we secured 119 MR Seminar completions, 605 new registrants to the Diversity and Inclusion workshops, 19 media placements totalling 990,150 impressions and a total advertising reach of more than 400,000 impressions.
